FLORIDA THEME PARK PLAN LOOKS LIKE A BLOCKBUSTER

New York Times News ServiceCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Wayne Huizenga has a vision.

Where others see merely 2,500 acres of wetlands, quarries and canals here on the eastern fringe of the Everglades midway between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale, he imagines the biggest new tourist attraction to arise in Florida since Disney World, a $1 billion sports and entertainment complex he calls Blockbuster Park.

Within five years, Huizenga plans to build a 45,000-seat domed stadium and an indoor sports and concert arena to house the major league baseball and hockey teams he owns.

In recent months, he has spent more than $30 million acquiring land-pocket change for a tycoon whose empire includes Blockbuster Video, the nation's largest movie-rental chain, three of Miami's four professional sports franchises, and other media and entertainment properties.

Eventually, "Wayne's World," as the project is widely known, also will have a theme park and entertainment village, movie, television and recording studios, office buildings, and hotels, restaurants and retail shops, assuming Huizenga can vanquish the opponents who argue that his plan will destroy the environment and drain away needed tax dollars.

There also are plans for a virtual-reality amusement center and other forms of leisure, like a golf course and an aquatic park.

But even that does not satisfy South Florida's most powerful businessman, whose fortune is estimated to be at least $700 million.

Tantalizing local politicians with promises of thousands of jobs, millions of visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues, he is seeking the power to run Blockbuster Park as a special district, a virtually self-contained entity with authority to issue bonds, condemn and zone land and collect its own 5 percent sales tax.

"He's building an absolute sports and entertainment juggernaut, the likes of which we've never seen before," said Charles Euchner, author of "Playing the Field," a recent book exploring the politics of the sports business.

"When he gets this thing completely put together, so that all the various pieces are reinforcing each other, he's going to be in an ideal position to become one of the leading marketers of sports and entertainment in all of the Americas."

It is precisely that prospect, though, that worries many people.

But others in South Florida are eager to embrace Blockbuster Park. They are fired by the conviction that if politicians had been more flexible 25 years ago when Walt Disney Co. was looking for a place to build a theme park in Florida, Disney World would have been built in Miami, not Orlando.